Serbia - Ministry of Education makes a list of unionised workers under the pretext of completing its database

In October 2016, the Ministry of Education asked school principals to make a list of unionised employees under the pretext of completing the Ministry’s database. In reaction to such a request, the three biggest teachers’ trade unions of Serbia, led by the CATUS Teachers’ Union of Serbia (TUS), sent a letter to the Minister to denounce the violation of both the Law on Personal Data Protection and the national labour law. The information requested, in fact, exists in school databases but given the strict confidentiality of their content, they have to be used only within the strict regulatory framework set by the law and cannot be arbitrarily dealt with. The Serbian Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data, Mladen Sabic, publicly stated his support for the trade unions’ campaign in consideration of the fact that the data demanded from school principals was “highly confidential and could only be handled with the consent of the people directly concerned”. Mr. Sabic pointed out, that any contrary behavior would be in breach of Article 16 of the Penal Code and therefore subject to criminal prosecution.